Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Roxie Hart

The controversy surrounding the new cover of Rolling Stone, which shows the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev looking like an emo heartthrob in a space usually reserved for styled rock gods, has all the trappings of a fleeting Twitter “outrage,” certain to subside by the week’s end. (Ian Crouch dissects reactions to the cover here.) Is it in bad taste? Is CVS right to ban it? Shouldn’t we be concentrating on the accompanying article? All fair questions, which by now you have likely hashed out over the digital water cooler. But the story has also put me in the mind of the 1975 musical “Chicago,” by John Kander and Fred Ebb.

If you haven’t seen the musical, which is running in revival on Broadway, or the Academy Award-winning movie, from 2002, the plot concerns two Jazz Age murderesses, Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, who compete for the attention of the Chicago tabloids and become overnight media sensations. The musical originated as a play by the journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins, who based Roxie and Velma on two real-life criminals she covered for the Chicago Tribune: Beulah Annan, whom she dubbed “the beauty of the cell block,” and Belva Gaertner, the “most stylish of Murderess’ Row.” (She also covered the equally lurid Leopold and Loeb trial.)

With its louche choreography by Bob Fosse, the musical takes a jaundiced view of the nexus of crime, the media, and celebrity. Its satirical tone, which cuts wryly against Broadway convention, has made it an unlikely and enduring touchstone. When the revival opened, in 1996, it seemed queasily relevant to an audience that had just lapped up the O. J. Simpson trial. Its antihero, Roxie, a frustrated showgirl, finds her match in the suave attorney Billy Flynn, who coaches her for her trial with the lyric “Give ’em the old razzle-dazzle.” In another number, “We Both Reached for the Gun,” Roxie sits on Billy’s lap like a puppet as he feeds the tabloids an exculpatory sob story. (“A convent girl! A runaway marriage!” a gossip columnist parrots.)

Roxie’s bid for notoriety climaxes in her eponymous solo, in which she predicts that “the name on everybody’s lips is gonna be Roxie” and asks archly, “And who, in case she doesn’t hang, / Can say she started with a bang?”

Undoubtedly, the American tradition of celebrity criminals is long, stretching back to Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid. (And Charles Manson, who, as many have pointed out, also graced the cover of Rolling Stone.) But “Chicago” captures something canny about the metabolism of fame and about the symbiosis between criminals and the hankering public. By the second act, the papers have moved on to another trial, and Roxie and Velma, still desperate for attention, team up for a vaudevillian double act. Sitting in the audience, we’re meant to feel conflicted sympathy for both—and complicity as the spectators of their cynical razzle-dazzle.

Should we feel any less complicit in the marketing of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who has attracted a misguided band of fans waving “Free Jahar” placards? (A teenybopper terrorist may be the logical conclusion of every cultural trend of the past decade.) Yes, he’s the recipient of misdirected empathy, and, no, we shouldn’t “glorify” his awful crimes in any way. Unlike Roxie, his motives don’t seem to include a desire to be on everybody’s lips. But the cover is part of a larger story of how crime and show business intertwine, particularly when the perpetrator has a photogenic face. The question is whether, by implicitly conflating Tsarnaev with the scruffy sex symbols it typically features on its covers, Rolling Stone is commenting on our commodification of outlaws or merely exemplifying it.